Second Most Popular Social Network by State

By Shahar Even-Dar Mandel

Second Most Popular Social Network by State

There’s no doubt about it, in the United States, Facebook is the undisputed king of social networks. In December 2015, Facebook had 21,390,733,000 US visits on both Desktop and Mobile, vastly more traffic than its 4 biggest social media competitors, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and Pinterest. In comparison to these competitors, Facebook takes home 78% of the traffic share, leaving 22% to the other 4 social networks.

(All data in this study refers to web data, not app)

Not only does Facebook dominate in the US as a whole, it is also the most popular social network in 50/50 states. If we were to make a map of this phenomenon, we would simply have a map of the United States of Facebook:

As you can clearly see, this map is pretty boring and says nothing new about state habits. Maybe it would have been interesting to look at several years ago, but nowadays we end up with dull and uniformly Facebook-blue map of the United States.

Therefore, in order to get a better idea of social trends by state, I decided to dive into our data and create a map of the second most popular social network in each state.

As it turns out, Instagram dominates the East Coast, West Coast, and is the second most popular social site in 4 out 5 of the most populous US states including California, Florida, New York, and Illinois. Texas, the one state missing from that list, is apparently Reddit territory. Reddit, in fact, is the preferred social network of most of middle and rural America, but also boasts Michigan and Massachusetts in the east.

Twitter represents an interesting case because in overall US traffic the website ranks in 2nd, but on a state level, the micro-blogging platform only captures 12/50 states. Of these states, the largest by population is Indiana, followed by Wisconsin.

Perhaps most interesting of all is that in Idaho, the second most popular social network isn’t Instagram or Reddit or even Twitter; it’s Pinterest. According to recent data, Idaho has about 1.6 million residents, and the largest religious group is the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormonism. After doing some digging, it seems Pinterest is actually extremely popular among Mormons and Gawker studied this trend back in 2012. This trend, however, fails to hold true over in Utah (the Mormon epicenter), where it is Instagram not Pinterest that is second most popular.

Enjoy the complete state map below:

Shahar Even-Dar Mandel is a Senior Researcher at SimilarWeb's mobile apps team. Shahar received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Tel Aviv University, he is obsessed with digital culture ever since installing Mosaic for the first time on his mother's PC back in 1994.